


To See the Stars

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Jason Todd is Robin, Nerd Jason Todd, implied homicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:41:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21994660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: What's so amazingThat it keeps us star-gazingAnd what do we think we might see?---Jason and Bruce go for a hike.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 40
Kudos: 308





	To See the Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [renecdote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/gifts).



> This fulfills Renecdote's BatFam Christmas Stocking prompt "stargazing," because I heard Kermit the Frog in my head and couldn't stop. So thanks for that.

“Watch your step.”

“ _You_ watch your step,” Jason retorted with a huff. “We’re climbing a mountain in the dark. I’m doing nothing _but_ watching my step.”

He paused and shoved his hands into his armpits as he eyed the narrow trail in front of them.

“What if there are snakes, Bruce?” Jason wanted to know. Every shadow potentially held a monstrous snake that would lash out and bite him, or a big, hairy spider that would crawl up his leg. He watched movies. He knew how it worked.

“They’re sleeping, Jason,” was Bruce’s untroubled reply.

“Why aren’t _we_ sleeping?”

That earned him a raised eyebrow. “Are you ready for bed?”

It was barely midnight. Jason was not ready for bed. If what waited for them back at the campsite even counted as a bed. It wasn’t the sleeping bags that bothered him—Jason had slept in more than his fair share of those, and sometimes less—but more the idea of putting that sleeping bag on little more than a thin strip of tent canvas and then dirt and leaves beneath that. Jason had slept outside on the ground before, and in his opinion, it wasn’t anything a person should do by choice, much less someone as disgustingly loaded as Bruce.

Then again, the man also choose to moonlight as a flying mammal, so who could judge what was sensible behavior for him.

Jason tripped and muttered a curse, then quickly shot Bruce a look to see if he had heard. But Bruce was staring down the trail, though what he saw Jason had no idea. Woods as an untamed entity were creepy enough, especially at night, but Bruce’s red-bulbed flashlight made everything look like Dante’s dark wood.

How had it gone?

_Halfway along our journey to life’s end,  
I found myself astray in a dark wood,  
Since the right way was nowhere to be found._

Bruce could quote it in Italian. Jason wasn’t so fancy. He could barely understand parts of the story in English, but he’d like the descriptions of the Inferno and the idea of immortal punishment being made to match mortal crime.

Still, it was a cool thing to read, but less of a cool thing to walk in. Jason was mostly complaining for fun, but he jumped every time a branch rustled or a twig snapped.

“Bruce, what if there are bears?” He’d asked about wolves and coyotes and mountain lions, but not bears yet. Bears would be bad.

“City slicker,” Bruce teased. It had taken Jason a little bit to read when Bruce was teasing him—he kept his voice so dry—but every time Jason caught it now, a little flicker of warmth lit up his insides.

Jason was not to be so easily distracted this time.

“But what if?” he insisted. He didn’t know what kind of bears might be out here, like brown or black or whatever, but they’d be big. And hungry, probably.

Bruce breathed out his mouth in a way that was almost a sigh but not quite. “If there’s a bear, I’ll fight it.”

“Bull,” Jason immediately countered. “You ain’t—aren’t—fighting a bear.”

“I have before,” Bruce answered as easily as if he were admitting to catching a fly ball.

“You have _not_!” Jason gasped, his breath clouding the air in front of him. “You lie.”

“I did,” Bruce insisted.

“You’ve brought me out here to kill me,” Jason decided. “It’s one long adoption scam. You’re gonna feed me to the bears and then use sympathy generated by my death to give WE a stock boost.”

“Jason,” Bruce sounded dangerously close to laughing. Or maybe actually feeding him to a bear. “I brought you out here for this.”

Reaching forward, Bruce ducked under a low-hanging branch and lifted it up. Jason stepped forward, out of the woods and onto the mountainside.

“Oh wow,” he whispered.

The trees cut off abruptly, and though there was a flat spread of earth a dozen yards or so down the mountain, the part they were standing on sloped at a gentle angle, so when Jason looked out, he saw only the dark valley below and the stars above.

Jason stood, mouth agape, and stared up into the night sky. He was oblivious as Bruce took his elbow and guided him to a soft patch of grass.

“So?” Bruce prodded gently, after Jason had stared so long that his mouth had gone dry. “What do you think?”

“There are so many,” Jason whispered. “I.. I didn’t know.”

He knew there were a ton of stars, of course. Everyone knew that. But he’d never _seen_ them before. The lights in Gotham didn’t let in more than a handful, even on the darkest nights. But here, on the mountainside, with Bruce’s flashlight off and the new moon failing to dim even the smallest star… They were all he could see.

Bruce unfolded the reflective camping blanket he had packed and wrapped it around both their shoulders. Jason leaned in, for warmth and the excuse to be close, and breathed in Bruce’s aftershave, but his eyes never left the sky.

“My father took me here once,” Bruce admitted. Jason did look at him then, attention ripped away by the mention of the closely guarded dead Waynes, but Bruce’s own gaze was on the heavens. “When I was… six or seven, I think. He carried me up the mountain and we sat here and he taught me the constellations. He said you would never be lost if you found the stars, and there was no problem in the world they couldn’t bring down to size.”

Bruce looked down at Jason, lips curving with the shadow of a smile. “I brought Dick here when he was a boy. So now it’s your turn.”

Because this was a thing Wayne men did with their sons.

Jason’s nose was red with cold, but he felt warm right down to his toes.

Bruce bumped Jason’s shoulder, then gestured to the brilliance spread above them. “What do you see?”

Jason squinted up, then replied solemnly, “The great kings of the past, watching over us.”

He cackled as Bruce gave him a shove sideways. “Alright, alright!” 

Jason was still smiling as he tucked himself against Bruce’s side and let his dad show him how to find the North Star.

* * *

The desert was cold but the fire engulfing the building at Jason’s back was enough to keep him warm, almost. He clasped his arms loosely around his knees and did his best to ignore the chill of the sand through his trousers. What did it matter, since it seemed like the cold had snuck into the marrow of his bones, with him from the moment he had clawed his way out of the earth.

The fire crackled and popped, and the man next to him shifted.

“I thought you said we didn’t need to set watch?” They didn’t. There was no one left to fear for miles.

“I’m not tired.”

His companion huffed a laugh. “You should be. You had quite the workout in there.”

It had taken over an hour to clear the hideout, thrice that to clean up the mess. Jason’s muscles ached, but his mind was a live wire.

“Shut up and go to sleep.”

The only answer was a dismissive harrumph and the soft shush of sand as the other man rolled over and closed his eyes.

Jason knew even if he lay down and tried to rest, sleep would elude him. It wasn’t the work; that rarely bothered him anymore. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust his partner for this mission; he didn’t, but he had confidence in his own ability to come out on top.

It was just…

Jason leaned back on his hands and looked up. He had spent his entire life in Gotham, the majority of it spent in the same ten-block radius. Even once he had moved beyond the Narrows, his whole world had been that city.

He hadn’t been back in years. Here, on the underside of the world, even the sky was different, and he felt every inch of the divide like a widening chasm in his chest.

The fire at his back spat embers and smoke into the sky, washing out the galaxies and staining the sky a dark red. In a lonely patch of wilderness, under a vast and unending heaven, Jason’s sky was empty.

_From this point, sighs, laments, and piercing groans  
Were echoing throughout the starless air._

“Abandon all hope,” Jason finished in a whisper, “ye who enter here.”

He was homesick for a place that no longer existed. He was lost.

Jason lay down, his arms behind his head, and kept watch until the sun rose.

* * *

He couldn’t breathe.

Jason clawed at the latch on his helmet, fingers fumbling and slipping until at last their tips caught and he yanked his head free from the confining dark. He knelt on the poured cement and felt the cold bite at his lungs as he sucked in ragged gasps of air.

He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t care. He had felt the panic attack building like static behind his ribs and had stumbled away, looking for quiet place to crumble. Sometimes the attacks could be linked—a smell, a sound, a memory that punched like a fist into his system and yanked on his adrenal glands. But sometimes, like this time, the attacks came from nowhere and nothing. They just were, and all he could do was ride it out alone.

Jason’s elbows bent and he tipped forward on his knees until his forehead pressed against the ground. It wasn’t the physical act of breathing that was the problem, but his brain’s insistence that the air was empty—no oxygen, no substance, just a weight that sat like a tombstone on his chest.

_Ride it out. Just ride it out._

Jason closed his eyes and focused on making his body settle. _Stop,_ he ordered his galloping heartbeat. _Just stop,_ he told the tremors making his fingers shake and wrists twitch.

He forced himself up, just enough to crawl backward until his back hit the brick wall of the building. He was freezing, shivering on the unprotected roof but he clawed at his jacket until he could yank down the zipper and free his neck. It wasn’t enough, so Jason’s fingers found the collar of his protective armor and pulled, only just able to free himself from the sensation of kevlar pressed against skin, but it helped.

When he was a kid, Bruce would rub Jason’s back during attacks, his touch light and rhythmic enough to be soothing instead of another irritation. If it happened on patrol, Bruce would wrap him in the dark confines of the cape and let Jason use it like a weighted blanket and sensory deprivation tank at all once. It helped. Just having Bruce there helped.

But Bruce wasn’t here now. Jason had made it home, finally, back to the familiar skies, but Bruce was dead. He’d made it home and he felt more lost than ever.

He needed to see the stars.

Still gasping, Jason fumbled for his pockets, clumsy hands feeling along the lining until his fingers wrapped around the small fob. He could lie and said he’d already through through his actions—near the docks, surrounded by businesses either abandoned or shut down for the night, no chance of harming anyone—but the truth was Jason gave little thought at all to the consequences as he activated the EMP and shut down a cascade of blocks in all directions.

Gotham’s lights still drowned out the heavens, but Jason’s little bubble of darkness let a few stars shine through. The pinpricks of light were faint against the washed grey sky and looked isolated and frail without the backdrop of the universe.

_Where am I? Where are you? You promised I could always find my way._

Jason swiped at his eyes, struggled for air, and tried to orient himself.

 _There._ The Big Dipper, or enough of it that Jason could track Merak and Dubhe to the winking light of Polaris. He sucked in a breath as the world seemed to shift, turning to align him with the stars, like waking up on the wrong end of the bed and having to wait for the orientation of the room to slot back into place. Scattered around Polaris were other familiar landmarks. Some, like Orion’s belt, punched through the city haze, while others were still too faint to see, but he knew. He knew they were there.

If Bruce were here, he would make some stupid, dry-as-sandpaper joke like _Remember who you are_ and nudge a reluctant smile out of him. Or maybe not. They hadn’t been close in the months before Bruce’s death, not by a long shot. But Jason wished Bruce were here, nonetheless. He wished… Well. He wished he believed in wishing on a star.

Jason stayed on the roof long past when his breathing evened out and his pulse settled. Only when the electricity in the neighborhood began to flicker back on did he pushed himself to his feet and dust himself off. The stars were lost again, but he found he didn’t mind as much. He didn’t have to see them to know they were there.

“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,” Jason murmured as he looked out across the city.

_It was from there that we emerged, to see – once more – the stars._

**Author's Note:**

> The media references come from the following:
> 
> \- "The Rainbow Connection" from The Muppets  
> \- Dante's Inferno (I cribbed from the translations by Anthony Esolen and J.G. Nichols)  
> \- The Lion King  
> \- plus one accidental reference to _Carry on Mr. Bowditch_ that audreycritter pointed out and I am claiming as subconsciously deliberate


End file.
